For the First Time, Five Dollars Makes a Difference to Us

When I pulled the crumpled coupon out of my purse and spread it out on the table at the Chinese restaurant where my family and I were eating, I thought, I am turning into my grandmother. A young mother during the Depression, Gram was always careful with her money, even later in life when she had a lot more of it. She'd window shop at the craft store, and then come home to her big house with nothing, because, she said, "Everything costs too much."

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But my husband and I had a lot to celebrate that night at the Chinese restaurant. He had survived layoffs at his job and I had survived cancer, getting clean PET scan results that very afternoon. Yet we decided we'd go out to dinner to celebrate only because we had a $5-off coupon. And I can't remember the last time that $5 had made a difference in our budget.

My grandfather, a self-made man who started his construction business in the 1930's by digging basements with a shovel, had long ago taught me: "Make your money work for you." He'd grill me on my account balances and ask me how my investments were doing. My parents, meanwhile, taught me to pay off my bills every month and to live below my means. And throughout our marriage, my husband and I have largely done that. We rarely took vacations. We drove our cars until they darn near died. We socked away money for retirement.

Last year, when we went for a loan to put an addition on our house and fix up the kitchen, our bank offered us an additional $200,000 over what we'd asked for. We declined, knowing full well we couldn't afford it. Instead, we took out only what we needed for our home renovations after dipping into our savings.

And then I got cancer. And then the market tanked. And then the layoffs began at the companies that I write for. Soon, our neighbors' houses started going up for sale, and I began checking the state of the Dow Jones before calling my father, who has taken up watching the stock market as his new retirement hobby.

And then, $5 started to make a difference to us.

We are one layoff and one bad PET scan away from real money trouble, the kind I read about in the newspaper while I clip coupons. And it makes me kick myself for not thinking twice about spending or saving that $5 ever before... before our (soon-to-be-rare) dinner out last week.

Here we had thought we were so far ahead of the game, because we had lived so much more frugally than most everyone we know, only to find out that perhaps we should have been living like my grandmother did. She was right: Everything costs too much, no matter what's in your savings account. And for us, that's an extra $5 I wouldn't have saved before.